Mrs Martha Thorpe, the slaughter house and a new row of shops on Beech Road

 Now when Mrs Thorpe opened her “slaughter house” in 1879 on Beech Road I doubt she thought that she would still be there selling cuts of meat, mince and tripe at the dawn of the next century or that her shop would have a passing connection with meat in the century to follow.

Looking down towards the "slaughter house" circa 1900

But that is just exactly what happened and in the process will have been visited by countless customers when it was Elk, which given its name is an interesting turn of events for what was originally a shop dealing in dead animals.

Until recently I had no idea of the date of the building and it was only as I trawled the rate books that its age came to light.

The rate books will tell you who owned the property and if it was rented and the estimated annual rent along with its rateable value.

And by slowly tracking back year by year it will be possible to arrive at the date the building was completed and first assessed for rates.

In our case this was 1878, not long after Chorlton Row and been renamed Beech Road, and when there were still farms, and smithy within a few minute’s walk of Mrs Thorpe’s business.

Beech Road, circa 1900

The row containing the "slaughterhouse" was part of the retail revolution which transformed how we shopped and a little over a century later  was the home of Primavera, which along with Cafe on the Green, the Italian Deli and the Lead Station heralded a second revolution which was the coming of the bars, cafes, and the shops selling "the interesting things". 

Location; Chorlton 

Picture; Beech Road, circa 1900 from the Lloyd Collection

One hundred years of one house in Well Hall part 10........... from bread and dripping to Museli

This is the continuing story  of one house in Well Hall Road and of the people who lived there including our family.*

Now I suspect pretty much every generation thinks that there’s was the one which has seen the most profound change and I am the first to accept that mine has no monopoly on the new inventions, mould breaking fashions and seminal music.

But there is no doubt that those of us born just after the last war, who started school in the early 1950s and are just beginning to enter retirement have experienced a bewildering revolution in what we eat and how we prepare that food.

I will have been four when rationing was finally abandoned, and in the succeeding decades came to take for granted a huge range of new foods sourced from all over the world and delivered within hours of being harvested.

And of course with all that came a deluge of specialist utensils, ever larger cookers and the microwave.

All of which makes me think back to our tiny kitchen at 294, which was just large enough to take an old battered Cannon gas cooker, and small fridge which nestled either side of the sink.

In their wisdom the architects had provided a largish store cupboard under the stairs and here went the bulk of our dried and tinned food.

And what couldn’t be found the cupboard or the fridge was still bought fresh and eaten on the same day.

But the fridge is the key to the change.

In the 1950s the growing reliance on frozen food would lift some of the drudgery out of preparing food.

Now I still like washing carrots, peeling potatoes and shelling peas but for sheer speed nothing beats opening the packet of frozen peas.

And sixty years ago the adverts for frozen foods focused on that simple message that they were quick to use and because of the way they had been frozen on the day they were harvested were bound to be fresher than the peas and carrots which had made their way from the field via the market to the small greengrocer, whose turn over dictated that the produce might sit for days before it was bought.

Of course few people in 1956 had a fridge let along a freezer which was why the bags of frozen vegetables came in small sizes which were bought and used on the same day.

And in much the same way out went the old fashioned breakfast of porridge, eggs, bacon and toast in favour of the breakfast cereal.

Now these had been around since the 1930s, and there are ads in the collection for Corn Flakes and Rice Crispies, but the 50s offered up a new and exciting range, often marketed with a toy or other novelty and clearly aimed at the young.

Mother was quick off the mark to try the "new TV dinners  for one" which came out in the late 50s but equally died a death in our house as too expensive and not that nice.

Instead we reverted to simpler home cooked food but there was no going back on the changes that had happened.

As each of us left to set up our own homes the variety and the quantity of what we bought and ate just kept on growing.

But Dad preferred his tins, and on one memorable evening after I had cooked a pasta dish he smiled and said quietly that "it was good but  didn't really like  food messed about."

Location;Well Hall, Eltham, London


Pictures;  adverts for Birds Eye Foods and Sugar Puffs, from Woman’s Own, January 12 1956

*One hundred years of one house on Well Hall Road, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/One%20hundred%20years%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Well%20Hall

Shakespeare and Manchester: A Victorian Powerhouse Exhibition

This exhibition tells, for the first time, the story of how seven personalities transformed Manchester into a global centre of Shakespearean theatre in the Victorian era and reveals present-day evidence of the city’s innovative engagement with the works of Shakespeare.

These seven people operated in diverse fields - business, religion, theatre, architecture, academia, politics - but were united by their appreciation of Shakespeare’s cultural value and, as if imitating the seven bees atop Manchester’s coat of arms, they collaborated to create an urban, libertarian, distinctively Mancunian interpretation of Shakespeare’s works.

The exhibition also presents traces of Manchester’s Victorian influence that can still be found today – the portrait of Ira Aldridge in Manchester Art Gallery, the Shakespeare Window in the entrance of the Central Library, and the Shakespearean Garden in Platt Fields Park.

One aim of this exhibition is to raise awareness of the benefits to mental and physical health conferred by the Shakespearean Garden and to obtain funding for a full-time gardener who can secure the future of the garden for the benefit of the citizens of Manchester.

Manchester Central Library First Floor Display Cases February 12th 2026 - May 30th 2026

"For so work the honey-bees,

Creatures that by a rule in nature teach

The act of order to a peopled kingdom.

They have a king, and officers of sorts,

Where some like magistrates correct at home;

Others like merchants venture trade abroad;"

The Life of King Henry the Fifth (1.2.187-92)

For more details please contact:

Dr. Ian Nickson. Honorary Research Fellow, University of Manchester, ian.nickson-2@manchester.ac.uk

Kattie Kincaid, Project Manager, Friends of Platt Fields Park, kattiekincaid@hotmail.com

Location; Manchester Central Library, St Peter's Square, Manchester, M2 5PD

Picture; The Shakespeare Window in the entrance of the Central Library

A scene now lost in time ............. looking out from the short lived cafe in Piccadilly Railway Station

Now that I grant you is not the most imaginative title but it does the business for this scene looking out across the city.

It was taken just after the railway station had its makeover.  Back then this space was a cafe and on a warm day I wandered in took a few pictures promised myself I would return only to discover it had become a supermarket.

Such are the ups and downs of the amateur photographer.
And I know I have featured it before and for those wanting to challenge the date I have to say I can’t remember.

Location; Piccadilly Railway Station

Picture; view from Piccadilly Railway Station, circa 2003, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

What has family history ever done for any of us ………..?

 Now I ask that question not to offend anyone and certainly not to rubbish countless people including friends as well as my own sisters who have given up endless hours trawling the internet, reviewing dusty archives and standing in quiet churchyards confronting the graves of long dead ancestors.

Unknown and undated family member

And as someone who has done my share of all those things I understand the fascination to know who we are by knowing something of those in our family who went before us.

The journey often throws up tragedies, a fair few mysteries and some lost relatives.

During my research, I not only solved one dark secret, but uncovered a few more yet to be solved and discovered a new and exciting area of historical research. *

But all of which should come with a health warning, like the time on a warm sunny Saturday morning when I received one of those familiar family birth, marriage and death certificates which tell you so much about your chosen relative.

In this case that sunny Saturday became a whole less bright and sunny when the death certificate revealed that a brother of my great grandma Eliz had committed suicide with a cutthroat razor. The shock mingled with an overriding sense of voyeurism that I was somehow intruding on a family tragedy stopped me in my tracks.  This was not some light breeze into the corners of a relative’s life  but something very sad and dark.

And it raised the question of why do it, why burrow deep into  the lives of people just because they were once family and because I could courtesy of the internet?

Uncovering their stories, undated

More so because some will have spent a lifetime burying those secrets away from the gaze of loved ones, family and friends.

I always did and still do justify it by trying to place them in the context of where and when they lived and by so doing try to understand how they fitted into the bigger picture.

In the past that had led me to stop digging around the 1830s.  This was not an arbitrary decision but based on the official registration of births deaths and marriages in 1837 and the first fully accessible census return of 1841 which offers up details of when and where people were born and later lived, along with their occupations, and family members.

It was a decision which made sense, because they were easily found by searching genealogical platforms and it fitted with my own interest in the Industrial Revolution.

And so, I had rather answered that question of what had family history ever done for any of us, because it allowed me to better understand the great sweep of history by seeing how my family made all of work.

"............ I have thrown away the scabbard"

Not for me that fruitless and questionable quest to discover if one of mine had fought at the Battle of Hastings and by degree had been rewarded by stolen English land or punished for not stopping that arrow that may have wounded Harold.

But now I have joined the quest because having known we originated in the east Highlands and were a member of a clan I have begun to wonder if we were mixed up in that disaster that was the battle of Culloden.  It was indeed a disaster for many of the Highlanders who followed the fop who aspired to win back the throne for the Stuart’s. The defeat led the Young Pretender to scuttle back to Rome leaving those who had followed his vain glorious and misjudged gamble to be harshly punished by the authorities.

The Highland charge at Culloden, 1746

The journey is new to me.

 I had  grown up with the stories from my uncles, two of whom fought with the Black Watch and listened to the Jacobite laments but the realities of the defeat had turned me against all things Culloden.

The Royalist army stand firm, Culloden, 1746

Until having done the ancestral DNA test which confirmed where we came from and rediscovering old family trees that took us back to a John Simpson born in the Highlands in 1780 I just wonder.  He was born just thirty-five years after the battle, and so will have grown up with family members who might well have talked in hushed tones about the defeat and may even have known that his father participated.

It is a tad romantic especially given the daft nature of the Stuart attempt and the subsequent vengeance which settled on the Highlands and I guess is all most impossible to fulfil, but I wonder if we could get close to uncovering our part in the events of 1745-6.

Well we shall see, and despite the heaps of rabbit warrens I might vanish down I think it would be fun and end up with me deciding family history can do a lot for us.

Uncle George in the uniform of the Black Watch, 1918

Location; Our family

Pictures;  Unknown and undated family member and George Bradford Simpson 1918, from the Simpson collection, uncovering their stories,  undated courtesy of Ron Stubley "Gentlemen he cried, drawing his sword, I have thrown away the scabbard", from Scotland's story: a history of Scotland for boys and girls, , and The Battle of Culloden, David Morier, 1746

*British Home Children, the growing historical study of young people migrated from Britain and other parts of the old British Empire by the Poor Law Unions, and children’s charities. One of these was a great uncle of mine.

Beech Road 1980

Now I always think that some of the most fascinating pictures of Chorlton are not those of a hundred years ago but the more recent.

Often these we remember because they are our past and yet in a strange way they can seem as remote as a photograph of Beech Road taken at the start of the last century.

So it is with this one taken by my old friend Tony Walker in 1980. Richardson’s still bears its name of the Beech Tree Bakery with its pine panelling.

The Police Station is still an office for the City Council and away in the distance we still had a Post Office.

Looking more closely I am struck at how in 1980 Beech Road was still a conventional parade of shops. Next to Richardson’s was the fabric shop Marcele Materials and further down the Wool Shop as well as one of the two butcher’s while the boarded premises had been a grocery store.

 Completing the row was the Chinese takeaway of Mr Chan and the furniture place, where you could get anything from a three piece suite to a 1950 rotating ash tray.

And facing them was another butcher’s shop, a hardware place a grocers and further down Muriel and Richard’s veg shop. Within two decades many of them had gone.

Picture; Beech Road circa 1980 from the collection of Tony Walker

One hundred years of one house in Well Hall part 9........... bold new designs and a bit of Formica

This is the continuing story of one house in Well Hall Road and of the people who lived there including our family.*

I often wonder what  those who lived in our house in the 1950swould have made of the new household designs which were featured in Woman’s Own for January 12 1956.

Of course they may never have taken the magazine but they would not have escaped the exciting new ideas for transforming their early 20th century house into one which fitted with the 1950s.

Looking at them today they seem quite ordinary and just a little old fashioned but back then they were at the cutting edge of all that was new and innovative.

The basic designs were all there two decades earlier but were way out of reach of most working people.

But by the mid 50s that was changing.

It was partly as a result of the growing prosperity, along with new mass produced materials like plastic and Formica and the ever present offer of hire purchase, which meant for a “few pounds down and the rest over easy instalments” bits of the new life could be pretty much within the reach of every one.

All of which marks the 1950s off as more of a mould breaker than perhaps “the swinging 60s.”

Here were bold new colours, exciting fabrics and designs which relegated the old heavy furniture many peoples’ dreams to a place in a museum along with the odd dinosaur and other ancient relics.

And along with all these were those sheets of hardboard, which were cheap and could be applied to everything from period doors to the space in front of ripped out fireplaces.

For a few bob you could obliterate the beautiful features around doors create flat level spaces and add wonders to the fitted kitchens.

In 294 the master bedroom had lost its fire place and in its place a gigantic headboard with drop down drawers and a reddish swirly affect which I thought was the pinnacle of modern design.

But then I was only 14.

Sadly the DIYers responsible had also managed to take out the other upstairs fire places leaving just one small fine cast iron one downstairs.

Now it is pointless to rail against this vandalism.

At the time it seemed new and different and after six years of a bitter and hard war along with the preceding period of grim austerity all this was what we deserved.

And I have to admit I mounted similar attacks in the 1970s on good taste pulling out old features which gave the house its authentic feel and covering the walls with wood chip.

All of which means that I would have been no better in 1956, but just maybe now I might have cherished what was already there and just added the odd new idea.

Location;Well Hall, Eltham, London

Pictures; from Woman's Own, January 12 1956

*One hundred years of one house on Well Hall Road, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/One%20hundred%20years%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Well%20Hall